Drinking whiskey clear!
So a few nights ago I was surfing the ‘Net, looking at open-source help desk software. I was thinking that I might add a help desk app to my business website, so that my clients could simply log on and report their problems via a web interface.
One of the apps I was interested in is called “PHP Support Tickets”. But when I went to their website, I was greeted with this:
I guess I can scratch them off the list.
“I cooked hotdogs on freshly cut and sharpened sticks over the coals of a big wood fire, and heated a can of beans and a can of cheese macaroni in the redhot hollows, and drank my newly bought wine, and exulted in one of the most pleasant nights of my life. I waded in the water and dunked a little and stood looking at the splendorous night sky, Avalokiteshvara’s ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds. “Well, Ray,” sez I, glad, “only a few miles to go. You’ve done it again.” Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running – that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there, with the Ma-Wink fallopian virgin warm stars reflecting on the outer channel fluid belly waters.”
– Jack Kerouac
The Dharma Bums
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Sites offering online storage and file sharing are not new. My all-time favorite such site, Visto, offered a free email account along with a desktop client that would sync your Outlook contacts, calendar and tasks between computers. The software even offered limited (250MB) file synchronization between computers. The whole thing was called the “Visto Desktop” and it was really cool… when I started using it… back in 1998! Sadly, Visto stopped offering their services to the public in 2002 so that they could focus on licensing their synchronization tech to cell phone companies and large corporations.
A lot has changed since then. But since I work from one computer at home, I haven’t had much need for such services. This changed this past Christmas, when I got a netbook and a smartphone. Suddenly, I had a desire (if not a need) to share data between devices. And although there are several sites out there offering such services, the hands-down favorite with the geek crowd is Dropbox.
Dropbox offers 2GB of storage space for free, with 50GB and 100GB accounts available for $9.99/month and $19.99/month respectively. You sign up, then download and install the client. It creates a folder called “Dropbox” in your user profile, and any files copied to that folder are automatically synced between that computer and Dropbox, and any additional computers you install the client on.
There are also two subfolders inside the Dropbox folder, “Public” and “Photos”. Files copied to the “Public” folder can be viewed by anyone on the Internet, which is handy for sharing documents with colleagues. A helpful context menu in Windows Explorer even copies the public URL to your clipboard for easy pasting to an email or IM conversation. You can use the “Photos” folder to create instant photo galleries: just create a new folder inside the Photos folder (“Ashley’s Birthday”) and copy pictures to the new folder. You can then send a link to your friends, who can view the pictures even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.
“You see this watch? You see this watch? That watch costs more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much’d you make? You see pal, that’s who I am, and you’re nothing. Nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here… close! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit? You don’t like it, leave. I can go out there tonight with the materials you’ve got and make myself $15,000. Tonight! In two hours! Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise. A-I-D-A. Get mad you son of a bitches, get mad. You want to know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes BRASS BALLS to sell real estate. Go and do likewise gents. Money’s out there. You pick it up, it’s yours. You don’t, I got no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those sits tonight and close, CLOSE. It’s yours. If not you’re gonna be shining my shoes. And you know what you’ll be saying – a bunch of losers sittin’ around in a bar. ‘Oh yeah. I used to be a salesman. It’s a tough racket.’ These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you they’re gold, and you don’t get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They’re for closers. I’d wish you good luck but you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you got it. And to answer you question, pal, why am I here? I came here because Mitch and Murray asked me to. They asked me for a favor. I said the real favor, follow my advice and fire your fucking ass because a loser is a loser.”
– Alec Baldwin as Blake
Glengarry Glen Ross
I’ve been making chili for 25 years now. Chili from a can, chili from scratch. Chili with common meats, chili with exotic meats. Mild chili, and chili so hot it’ll take the roof of your mouth off… you name it! And I’m happy to announce that, as of this past Monday, I have perfected my “everyday chili” recipe. Even better, I’m going to share it with you!
Software:
1 lb. 80/20 ground beef
1 lb. ground pork
6 oz. Mexican chorizo (approx.; see below)
1 large or 2 medium white onions
1 can Rotel Hot
1 can Ranch Style beans
1 packet Carroll Shelby’s chili mix
Beef base, or beef broth (see below)
Hardware:
1 large pot
1 medium skillet (optional)
1 strainer
1 large spoon
1 bowl
1 small whisk or fork
Lisa and I made tacos a few days before, but instead of using ground beef for my tacos, I used chorizo instead. I put the leftover chorizo in a small (10 oz.) Tupperware container, and it was almost full when I was done. This is where I got the “6 oz. approximately” in the ingredients list. You may add more or less if you wish.
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“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then, again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two AM changes to six AM. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need Bolivian Marching Powder.”
– Jay McInerney
Bright Lights, Big City
Internet giant Amazon launched a new online storage service called Cloud Drive this week. But it’s far more than just online storage. Here’s a quick round-up where you find out what it is, why it’s cool, and why Amazon’s looking at the Big Picture with it.
Cloud Drive is an online storage service. You can get 5GB worth of disk space for free, or you can upgrade to 20GB for $20/year, 50GB for $50/year, 100GB for $100/year and so on. As a “limited time offer”, Amazon is offering a US residents a free one-year upgrade to 20GB if you buy any album from their mp3 store. And I do mean any album: I bought Radiohead’s Kid A album for $2.99 and got the free upgrade immediately.
So here’s what the Cloud Drive looks like:
As you can see, it’s a pretty basic interface. There are default folders for documents, music, pictures and videos, and you can create any additional folders or subfolders you wish. There’s also a “Deleted Items” folder, just in case you accidentally delete the wrong thing. It’s pretty cool so far, right? But not very revolutionary?
Well check this out… Here’s Amazon’s Cloud Player:
You can access and play your music from any other computer via a web browser. Playlists are supported, and are easy to edit via drag and drop. Embedded album art is also supported, as is sorting by artist, album, or even genre. It might not be the prettiest interface ever written, but it’s functional, simple, and gets the job done.
But wait! There’s more!
Here’s Amazon’s updated Amazon MP3 app for Android:
Yep, the same song that was just playing on my desktop computer is now playing on my phone! And this is Amazon’s Big Picture, and it’s why Cloud Drive is so cool.
It’s no secret that Android is, by far, the most popular smartphone operating system. In fact, Android recently hit a 53% market share, which exceeds the rest of the smartphone operating systems combined. And it’s only going to grow in the future, with hundreds of Droid-powered tablets due to hit the market soon.
But while iPhones have had iTunes built-in from day one, Android has been missing a killer audio player. The Android Market is full of apps that claim to work with iTunes and other PC-based players… but don’t. The recently released WinAMP for Android claims to offer wireless syncing over Wi-Fi, but this blog post has dozens of complaints about how it doesn’t work that well, especially on 64-bit versions of Windows. But even if it worked flawlessly, the WinAMP app only offers local syncing, which is great if you want to update your tunes while at home, but simply doesn’t work if you’re already away from home and want to hear a song.
And this is where Cloud Player comes in. I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far its worked flawlessly on my phone. Just upload some songs from home (an optional Adobe AIR upload applet is available) or buy them from the Amazon store and the songs instantly show up on the Cloud Player, either on a desktop PC or your phone.
My virtual desk is creaking under the load of news I have for you… so let’s get to it!
– Unless I’ve missed it, it seems like the US media has been awfully quiet about Vice-President Joe Biden locking a journalist in a closet for several hours so that he (the journalist) couldn’t ask questions during a fundraiser. Seriously – this is borderline kidnapping folks… why do I have to read about it from British newspapers?
– Monsanto, the biotech firm that’s been genetically altering crops for years, is now facing a giant lawsuit. You see, Monsanto’s seeds are sterile, meaning the farmers have to buy new ones from the company every year… which is one thing. But Monsanto has (allegedly) sued some farmers who have had their crops contaminated by Monsanto products. The charge? Patent infringement. What’s worse, many of these farmers are organic, and they want nothing to do with Monsanto’s seeds, since cross-pollination can cause them to lose their “organic” status. So, basically, a conventional farmer plants Monsanto seed. Some of it gets picked up by the wind and lands on organic farms… and instead of the organic farmer suing Monsanto for creating the mess, Monsanto sues the organic farmer for using their seeds without permission. Nice!
– Speaking of “nice”… you know how airlines are supposed to compensate you if your flight is cancelled or if you’re bumped because of overbooking? Well, cheap-ass European airline Ryanair doesn’t think its fair that they should have to pay for that, so starting April 4, the airline is going to charge a £2 “compensation levy” on all airfares. So you can pay for their screw-ups!
– One of the first real-time “instant message” chats on the Internet (well, ARPANET) took place in 1975. Participants included Ronald Reagan, artist Marcel Broodthaers, cultural anthropologist Edward Said and actress Jane Fonda. Someone somewhere made a transcript, and it’s an interesting read. It’s funny how novel the idea seemed at the time, and you can actually see the moment Reagan went from “old fuddyduddy who just doesn’t get it” to “man who understands the awesome capability of such a tool”. Check it out!
– There’s yet another possible HIV vaccine out there. The difference with this one? It’s completely artificial (it’s not modified pig genes, for instance) and it has the ability to change along with HIV. Human trials could start in a year.
– Speaking of medicine, HuffPo (I know, I know) has a nifty post about a woman who had a botched eye lift and now cannot close her eyes. And yes, a lawsuit is pending.
– It’s come to this: four cans of vegetables can get you FOUR free tickets to a Timberwolves game. It almost doesn’t seem worth it (the team is 17-58 at the moment).
– Speaking of sports, I found this great article about soccer in the US, and why it never took off the way gridiron or basketball did (short answer: stupid business practices, but be sure to read the whole thing).
– Lastly, it looks like Yahoo! Messenger is now censoring links sent in instant messages. Basically, there’s a site out there called FilesTube that indexes public file sharing sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload. It’s kind of a Google for pirates. Links to FilesTube in Yahoo conversations are quietly deleted, with no warning given to the sender or recipient. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal… except how is Yahoo! doing this? Is this something built-in to the client? Or is Yahoo! actually searching and filtering millions of messages a day?